Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

White supremacy is terrorism.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

We will not go quietly into the night; we will not vanish without a fight.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Stop using mental illness to avoid talking about armed white supremacy.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

There are no moderate republicans – only extremists and cowards.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

The arc of the moral universe doesn’t bend itself. it’s up to us.

Giving up is unforgivable. ~Joe Biden

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

It looks like winning debates is a black job!

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Well, whatever it is, it’s better than being a Republican.

You are here: Home / Politics / domestic terrorists / Late Night Open Thread: Rage Against War Tantrums Against Democracy

Late Night Open Thread: Rage Against War Tantrums Against Democracy

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Adam already linked to news of this ‘protest‘ in his thread tonight, but IKYMI:

A thread:

Extracts from Molly Conger’s longer thread:


Petrizzo writes for the Daily Beast; I’ll be checking tomorrow to see if he’s got a story up.

Reader Interactions

144Comments

  1. 1.

    Aussie Sheila

    Where is Jill Stein. No seriously. Where is she and the US Greens? Too cowardly to show their real colours? What an absolute, execrable joke this so called ‘demonstration’ was. A bunch of Nazis (predictably), and a bunch of Putin supported nut jobs and assorted libertarians. But I repeat myself.

  3. 3.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Aussie Sheila: I think she was there.  Or at least, isn’t that her in the left-end of both the pics in the last tweet of the OP?  Regardless, I agree with you about *spit* Jill Stein.

  5. 5.

    Mousebumples

    Since it’s an open thread, just an FYI that I think WaterGirl is planning to put up a Wisconsin Primary returns post/music/postcarding thread on Tuesday.

    Polls close at 8pm central, but I think postcarding posts go up closer to 7pm central.

    I’m hoping to be there, but I’ve got a long drive for work that day, probably. (I might try to just call in remotely, if the crazy snowstorm forecasted looks like it might come while I’m out of town.)

    Anyhow, hope to see you guys there – and to see a liberal judge advancing to the April election!

  6. 6.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Nettoyeur: Not all of them, but enough to see who and what the tankies are. Absolute execrable idiots, or otherwise Putin funded. Or both I suppose.

  7. 7.

    Another Scott

    I think the tiny size of the rally is an excellent sign.  It isn’t that hard to get a few thousand people to come to a rally in DC, and the weather was very nice today.  200?  That’s really, really, r e a l l y, small.

    Is our Americans learning?

    Evidence points to YES.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  8. 8.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Another Scott: I’ll believe that when the Republican Party stops whining about the relatively small amount of military aid (compared to the total US Defence budget) being sent to assist the Ukrainian people. Until then I won’t rest easy. I am so worried about the 2024 US election. For any number of reasons, but particularly in relation to Ukraine.

  9. 9.

    Tony G

    Ron Paul is apparently in a competition with Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger to see who can live the longest and most useless life.

  10. 10.

    Tony G

    @Aussie Sheila: I wonder whether there was ever a time when the American Green Party was not worse than useless.  I never paid much attention to them before 2000, when Ralph Nader and his bloated ego helped George W. Bush become president.

  13. 13.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony G: I agree they are worse than useless. They contribute mightily imo, to the relative incoherence of the non Democratic Party left, and hamper the development of a serious left that could assist people labouring away within the Democratic Party. I now believe that they are another Putin funded entity in the US together with elements of the Republican Party.

    I wonder when the US DoJ is going to get serious about foreign funding of US political parties?

  16. 16.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Aussie Sheila:

    I wonder when the US DoJ is going to get serious about foreign funding of US political parties?

    There’s a story I read once (maybe it was in a spy novel) that the reason the US tolerated the existence of tax havens and bank secrecy, was so that the CIA could pay its agents secretly, move funds around secretly.   In that same sense, Citizens United is too valuable to the US money men: it allows them to buy parties and candidates.  That it allows our enemies to do the same …. well, that’s just a regrettable side-effect.  Sigh.

  18. 18.

    Another Scott

    @Aussie Sheila: A lot of the GQP opposition to Biden’s and the Democrats’ support for Ukraine is performative – if Democrats are for it, they have to be against it.  But it’s kinda half-hearted because they know that military veterans and lots and lots of traditional Republicans are flying Ukrainian flags and more.  They have to be careful.

    (Yes, recent polling is mixed, but polling in the US is kinda broken…)

    A lot of the opposition from Qevin McQarthy and others  has been more in terms of “no blank checks” than saying they’ll actually block aid.  They want to use it for leverage, but know they have a weak hand.  Yes, it’s infuriating that they’re throwing up roadblocks, but it’s not a problem that won’t be overcome.

    So, I wouldn’t worry about that too much, myself.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  19. 19.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Chetan Murthy: I hadn’t thought of that. Sounds plausible. My god I despise the US Greens. Even more than some ‘conservatives’. They are such absolute frauds, such absolute political narcissists and useful idiots for the very things they profess to oppose.

    Absolute eff wits at best. At worst, a deliberate conspiracy to destroy any semblance of a decent and not ‘mad’ US left.

  21. 21.

    Tony G

    @Aussie Sheila: Yeah.  At least since 2000 the Green Party has apparently adopted the tactic of helping right-wing Republicans to be elected because the real enemy is liberal Democrats.  Maybe they’re being funded by both Putin and the Republican Party.

  22. 22.

    Ken

    This reminds me of Donald Westlake’s 1966 comic novel The Spy in the Ointment, in which a criminal mastermind recruits a disparate bunch of (very small and relatively ineffective) terrorist groups to carry out his plot. There were Nazis, Maoists, Stalinists, Trotskyites, IRA wannabes, Jewish supremacists, Christian supremacists, and other, weirder groups, most of whom hated one another as much or more as they hated the U.S. government.

  24. 24.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony G: That wouldn’t surprise me in the least. In the US political structure, any leaching of progressive votes away from the only opposition to the Republican Party is objectively right wing politics. If they were serious they would build up from a local level, but they aren’t, and that’s why they are dangerous. I could never understand why some progressives thought voting for Nader was a good idea in 2000. Utter madness, even from here. What a destructive and terrible campaign that was, on Nader’s behalf. I haven’t had any time for him since, or the people who thought it was a good idea.
    They live there, and don’t seem to have clue about the imperatives that FPTP voting places on people and parties.

  26. 26.

    scav

    @Suzanne: We are getting down to at least D-list politicians.  Probably beyond, presumably appearances on Hollywood Squares were at least renumerated.

  27. 27.

    Sure Lurkalot

    Maybe I’m an outlier, but I bet most of us believed that many people we now decry made sense to us at some time. Purity…it’s a difficult road.

  28. 28.

    sdhays

    @Aussie Sheila: Part of the issue was the perverse way some of our laws have been written to further solidify the 2-party system. For example, getting treated as a “major party” with ramifications for ballot access and public campaign financing are related to the performance of the Presidential campaign in the last election. At least that’s what I recall.

  29. 29.

    Kent

    @Chetan Murthy:

    There’s a story I read once (maybe it was in a spy novel) that the reason the US tolerated the existence of tax havens and bank secrecy, was so that the CIA could pay its agents secretly, move funds around secretly.   In that same sense, Citizens United is too valuable to the US money men: it allows them to buy parties and candidates.  That it allows our enemies to do the same …. well, that’s just a regrettable side-effect.  Sigh.

    I don’t buy it.  The CIA has the resources to move money around under any financial system.  They don’t need  that.

    On the other hand, banking secrecy, tax havens, and Citizens United all do have the same root.  And that is for people of wealth to employ and weaponize their wealth without leaving footprints or fingerprints.

  30. 30.

    Suzanne

    @scav: I just don’t relate. They work so hard to stay in the public eye, but I bet they’re all broke. Being rich and famous would already be shitty; broke and famous is a nightmare.

    Rich and anonymous is def the way to go.

  32. 32.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Sure Lurkalot: It’s not ‘political purity’ to recognise the structural and political futility of running ‘third party’ candidates for President in the US. I am fiercely partisan in my politics, and to the left by a wide margin even in my own country. But I vote tactically and carefully. Because I know how this stuff fucking works in my country.

    If you don’t know how it works in your own country, it is not political purity that stops you being stupid. It is political stupidity masquerading as political purity. In other words, politics as personal aesthetics.

  34. 34.

    James E Powell

    @Suzanne:

    I kind of knew Dennis back in the day. He & his brother Gary were my cousin Bobby’s high school friends. Worked as a volunteer for his post-mayoral city default comeback. Had dinner with him & his wife a couple times. He was one of the smartest political people I have ever met. I have no clue what happened to send him to wherever he is now. I’m thinking it was a series of unfortunate events.

  35. 35.

    Kent

    @sdhays:

    @Aussie Sheila: Part of the issue was the perverse way some of our laws have been written to further solidify the 2-party system. For example, getting treated as a “major party” with ramifications for ballot access and public campaign financing are related to the performance of the Presidential campaign in the last election. At least that’s what I recall.

    That has nothing to do with it.  In a democracy, ANY democracy, you need to reach 50% + 1 to achieve any political objective.  In the US that happens within the two political parties through primaries and such. In parliamentary democracies that happens during the process of building a government.  Arguably the coalition building happens closer to the people here in the US as we actually participate in primaries.  Whereas in parliamentary systems the voters are just spectators to the whole process.

    A Green Party or Libertarian Party or any other party is utterly useless unless they can command 50% whether in the US or anywhere else in the world.

  36. 36.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Aussie Sheila:

    If you don’t know how it works in your own country, it is not political purity that stops you being stupid. It is political stupidity masquerading as political purity. In other words, politics as personal aesthetics.

    Oh I totally agree. We got that in spades in the US.

  37. 37.

    West of the Rockies

    I recall being  tepidly Larouche-curious for literally about a minute in 1980.  I was 18 and politically ignorant.  How anyone can take Gabbard seriously is befuddling.

    I wonder how many people under 40 even know who Larouche was.

  38. 38.

    RaflW

    “dennis kucinich is up now, with tulsi gabbard and ron paul on deck”

    Is this the entertainment lineup on the cruise line to hell?

  39. 39.

    James E Powell

    @West of the Rockies:

    I vaguely recall him being treated like a person to be reckoned with for a short time. Then it was his followers bugging people at the airport. Then some kind of tax evasion stuff. Then nothing.

  40. 40.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Kent: Wrong. People select their candidates here at the local electorate level. Once again, political parties select candidates in the sense that the local Branches determine the candidates, and then put those candidates forth for election in the general election at state or federal level and in Council elections. It is true that sometimes a Party will swoop in and impose a candidate on local party members .

    It never goes well for the Party concerned. As the ALP found out here last year in my state. We lost a capable, albeit conservative MP because the ALP imposed her on an electorate that didn’t want her.

    I believe in political parties selecting their own candidates. I do not approve of so called ‘open primaries’ where any rat effer can come in and impose bad and unwanted candidates on an electorate, and I don’t  approve of head offices appointing their own picks.

  41. 41.

    Ohio Mom

    @Sure Lurkalot: Oh, I remember being Green-curious sometime in the early to mid 90s. A friend had married an enthusiastic Green Party adherent and a lot of what he said resonated with me. Democrats were a disappointment in many ways back then to me (maybe they still would be but I’ve since thrown out the ruler I measured them by).

    I thought and thought about and realized I was stuck being a Democrat because at least they could win elections. By the time Nader came along, I was long done with the idea of the Greens.

    And now that my memory has been jogged, I vaguely remember Kucinich as a sort of harmless novelty act.

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Ohio Mom: Kucinich is such a sad case.  I remember him from when he was a state senator and I was working with the Democratic Senate Caucus against “tort reform.”  He was really good back then.  Peter Principle?

  43. 43.

    Redshift

    @kindness:

    Anti war people supporting Putin. And here I thought Republicans were the big hypocrites.

    Ever since the full scale war started, there have been people hiding behind claims that they’re “anti-war” to pretend they’re not advocating for letting Putin have Ukraine. A few are genuinely simple-minded enough to think that being inflexibly anti-war is a principled stance, but most think they’re cleverly hiding being pro-Putin, because they know it’s unpopular.

  46. 46.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Redshift: Agree totally. I think there are still so called ‘lefties’ in the US who think supporting Putin is edgily ‘left’ rather than being the objectively fascist position it is. Absolute eff wits and not a lefties Ahole.

  47. 47.

    kalakal

    @Aussie Sheila: That’s pretty much how it works in the UK as well. Varies in detail between the parties. Party membership in the UK is very small but if you join your local party you get to pick your candidate ( or occasionally get rid of your mp)

  49. 49.

    Aussie Sheila

    @kalakal: Yes, and preferential voting here ensures that people can express pretty fine grained ‘preferences, or dis preferences, as it were. FPTP is simply terrible.

  50. 50.

    kalakal

    Interesting to see dissension amongst the comrades. Just had a look at a few hard line tankie sites eg wsws* and once you fight through the undergrad marxist verbiage** they’re accurately excoriating this bunch as libertarian stooges.

    *Bunch of cult like Trots claiming the mantle of the 4th International

    ** My head hurts, its been years since I waded through the gish gallop of Marxist cliches that nitwits like this deploy instead of reason & logic

  51. 51.

    Another Scott

    @Aussie Sheila: The presidential election system here is weird.

    Betty Cracker in FL and I (and my J) in VA voted for Nader in 2000.   Our Virginia votes for him made no difference.  Betty’s didn’t either, really – there were too many messed-up things about the election in Florida then (the butterfly ballot was a big one:

    We show that the butterfly ballot used in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the 2000 presidential election caused more than 2,000 Democratic voters to vote by mistake for Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, a number larger than George W. Bush’s certified margin of victory in Florida.

    )

    Small numbers of protest votes are common in most elections – they usually didn’t affect the outcome… :-(

    Agreed that FPTP can be pathological – it’s been a disaster in the UK. The Electoral College was claimed by Publius in Federalist 68 to be

    …men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice.

    Yay! The easily swayed mob wouldn’t pick the President! Reason and deliberation would prevail!! But, instead, we ended up with an EC that isn’t a protection at all; it’s a system that values land more than voters and there’s no debate about fitness of the candidates at all because the slate of electors is picked based on party loyalty…

    HTH!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  52. 52.

    Redshift

    @West of the Rockies: I remember LaRouche running for president from prison (’92, I think.) There was a period where LaRouchies were hiding who they were and running in Democratic primaries. In the few cases where they won, Dems exposed and disavowed them, even though it cost them the race. That’s one of the big differences between Democrats and Republicans – Goopers will let a known nutbar infiltrator win for power, which is part of how they got to be how they are now

  53. 53.

    RaflW

    @Omnes Omnibus: I feel like in the 90s Kucinich had good, liberal ideas. My roommate just after college graduation I remember was quite a fan, and we used to talk politics a lot.

    But it was clear he was never really going to go that far. Just didn’t have whatever combo of ego, smarts, smarm and money-connecting candidates need to really advance.

    And then I feel like I lost track for years, and DK had become another crank.

  54. 54.

    gwangung

    @Kent:A Green Party or Libertarian Party or any other party is utterly useless unless they can command 50% whether in the US or anywhere else in the world.

    This is a fact that almost no progressive realizes, or else their tactics would change. They’d rather bitch than fix; their idea of a political triumph is to sabotage a Democratic plan.

    (Guys, the coinage of political power is WINNING ELECTIONS. You have no triumph unless you WIN ELECTIONS).

  55. 55.

    prostratedragon

    @sdhays: Josh Marshall made a reasonable conjecture about Seymour Hersh that might also apply to someone like Kucinich, to wit that it’s not that they have recently gone round the bend. Rather, they’re now away from editors and other stabilizing influences, so those freak flags can fly freely in the wind. Kucinich might have been collegial enouhh in Congress to accept some party discipline.

  57. 57.

    gwangung

    @kalakal: Yeah, you saw that with Sander’s strategy in 2020. He had some really big advantages going to that primary and he pissed it all away. His supporters never tumbled to the fact that cooperation can be a winning strategy and that getting SOME concessions from the winner is better than getting none at all.

  60. 60.

    Aussie sheila

    @gwangung: His supporters theory of the case was mad before the rest of the field dropped out. Once that happened political gravity asserted itself.

  61. 61.

    Chris T.

    I like the idea of “ranked choice” voting (as in Australia) but it’s a bit complicated: I have to pick who I like most, second most, etc. As someone who actually votes all the time, this could get really sticky with all the candidates on the ballot. So here in the States we mostly have that 50%+1 rule, which we all agree sucks.

    There’s an alternative I’ve read about where you just vote “yea, or nay, or no-opinion” on each candidate: a yea means +1, a nay means -1, and no opinion means zero. Then the voting tabulators add all the +1s and subtract all the -1s, and whoever has the biggest number (maybe required to be positive?) wins. Obviously this has some drawbacks, but I wonder how well it would work in practice… it would make filling out ballots easier, which is a big advantage, as you could just go “yeah” and “ugh” and leave the rest at “no opinion”.

  62. 62.

    Kayla Rudbek

    I think that I have seen more people at Gravelly Point watching the airplanes at National than at this “rally”.

    and in other news, I’m stuck in Minneapolis until Saturday thanks to the weather. My initial plan was to fly back to DC on Tuesday, which is going to be the beginning of the snow. I say “stuck” because I’m tired of walking on eggshells around my dad. My sibling said that more than 2 weeks with my parents would drive either of us nuts.  I have teleworking and knitting so at least I don’t have to listen to him rant all day. So far, I’ve managed 4 finished projects, and I have the day off tomorrow…

  63. 63.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Chris T.: It’s not that complicated really. In most electorates, the first three of four highest preferred on the ballot ‘seals it’ for the winning candidate. Sometimes it goes down to the final preferences in a big field. In any case, political parties here hand out HtV leaflets outside polling stations, advertise in local newspapers and otherwise alert supporters and others their preference arrangements.

    I prefer our system because it allows people to express wider political preferences than just the two main, usually governing parties, and it encourages new parties to enter the field. This means that existing political parties need to perform if they are to continue to satisfy an electorate that has a wide choice of candidates, and an opportunity for the electorate to express their views about political parties seeking their support, via their ballots.

    People are quite smart when it comes to voting here.

  65. 65.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Another Scott: We’ll I’m not sure about Party loyalty being the reason candidates are picked in the US . Sinema was an absolute disgrace, but I believe she and Manchin were covering for other conservative Democratic Party senators in their absolutely disgraceful refusal to back their Party, particularly over voting rights. Simply inexcusable.

  67. 67.

    Fake Irishman

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Native clevelander here. I was born the year he was elected mayor. Saved muni power from the banks. Lost big in 1980Was the only Dem who took a state legislative position from an incumbent Republican in the 1994 statewide debacle.(Kay probably still gets hives thinking about that one…) Ran for Congress, won in 1996. Steadily morphed from hard had labor hero to progressive to well….

    when the chips were down, he voted for the ACA. And, much to the shock of journalists in the House Gallery, actually started lobbying his colleagues on the floor of the house to vote for it too. I give him that, th rough it saddens me what he has become.

  69. 69.

    David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch

    One the photos of kooks holding signs about US controlling the weather says LBJ was President in May of 1962. Those are the LaRouches. I encountered them at a DMV once (they had a table right at the entrance) and all of their signs had bizarre historical inaccuracies.

  73. 73.

    Anotherlurker

    Off topic.  I have been re-watching “The X Files” .  I am impressed with the care and skill with which it is produced. The writing is done with skill and humor.
    However, they also produced one of the creepiest, most disturbing episodes in season 4, episode 2, “Home,”.  It deals with extreme cultural stereotypes.

    I won’t go any further now, for fear of a spoiler. However if you are into “WTF did I just watch?” then this episode is for you.

    For the record I enjoyed it.

  74. 74.

    JustRuss

    @James E Powell: I saw Kucinich speak once, at a fairly small local event.  Came across as very sharp and thoughtful, I’m sorry to see that he’s thrown in with these idiots.

  78. 78.

    ColoradoGuy

    We’ve had Tankies for a long time here in the US. I went to anti-Vietnam-war rallies back in my college days, and more than once, some clown, who obviously was not a student at our college, ran up on the stage, seized the microphone and start ranting with a lot of crazy stuff. The crowd would get angry and boo, there would be a brief tussle on the stage, and they would be physically thrown off, then heckled by the crowd as they slunk away in disgrace.

    The general consensus was they were A) Maoist/Stalinist tankies or B) FBI provocateurs trying to start a riot or C) all-purpose lunatics trying to grab the spotlight. In any event, not One Of Us, and hijacking our rally was NOT appreciated by anyone there.

    The same damn people are STILL around fifty years later, although these days Q-Anon is more likely to be present than the FBI or local cops trying to make trouble. The so-called Green Party in this country has always been more of a group of performance artists trying to get on TV, instead of any kind of political force. They’re not that different from the clowns with giant puppets and drum circles … politics as performance art, which is what happened to the Occupy Wall Street movement.

  79. 79.

    lurker

    @Anotherlurker: used to really love that show – connected to it a sometime in the first season and kept with it for a while.  eventually came to realize it was just too anti-science and conspiratorial, and seemed to be feeding the wrong kind of ideas for people.  great writing, acting, production in general.  And then I tried to watch Millennium, which just never quite worked.

     

    The humorous episodes were always the best, some of which took me way too far into the episode before I realized the gag.

     

    Good show as long as you did not let yourself take it too seriously…

  80. 80.

    Major Major Major Major

    @lurker:

    The humorous episodes were always the best

    Five of Darin Morgan’s six episodes (Humbug, Jose Chung’s From Outer Space, Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose, Mulder & Scully Meet the Were-Monster, and The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat) are among the finest hours of television ever made. We did “from outer space” as a ‘reading’ one week in a college creative writing class.

    David Duchovny once said, “what
    I loved about his scripts was that he seemed to be trying to destroy the show.”

  81. 81.

    lurker

    the right tends to have the whole rugged individualist thing to point to as an ideal, never mind that we all survive as parts of a community working together.

    for the left, particularly in my experience in leftier parts of the world, purity and unwillingness to compromise principles to get anything done seems to come into play – Bernie seems to be able to play those types like a fiddle at this point, while still working with more corporate-aligned pols to actually get some things done in practice.  No way we get some of the things passed in Biden’s first two years that passed the Senate if Bernie was as much of a purity troll as he plays in public.

     

    In the middle/moderate/non-political/both-sides area of politics (not the extreme ends but alleged moderates) you tend to get something of the opposite – everyone should work together and compromise, but they hate politics or acting political.

     

    at some point in life, you either realize that everything involving two or more people is political, or you leave yourself blind to that reality…

     

    this pseudo-rally sounds like people at least claiming to be blind to it, likely to hide their real agenda [knew I could get this to be on topic eventually ; – )]

  82. 82.

    lurker

    @Major Major Major Major: I clearly took the wrong classes, possibly at the wrong university, and maybe too early…

    I remember a couple of those off the top of my head (vaguely) … been a while

    I specifically remember something involving a circus-like setting and Scully and Mulder dancing to a really schmaltzy love song at the end, and do not have the time to run down that rabbit-hole and track it down – great stuff, hilarious, and a bewildering episode most of the way through…

  83. 83.

    JWR

    Anybody jonesin’ for some pro-Soviet opinionatin’ should check out Pacifica Radio, (KPFK 90.7 in SoCal), most weeknights from midnight to 3 or 4 AM. I tell ya, I learn a lot from them. Like, did you guys know what really caused Damar Hamlin’s on-field cardiac arrest? Yep, it was that damn Covid vaccine! (Phew! Good thing I’m not in the NFL anymore.//)

    And Roger Waters has a lot to say about his former bandmates pulling their streaming catalog from Russia. Their problem, according to Waters, is that they just don’t read enough. (His emphasis.) I listen to Pacifica’s programming from time to time, but the Roger Waters stuff is so over the top it’s almost funny. Almost, were the consequences not so dire.

  86. 86.

    lurker

    @Major Major Major Major: yeah, probably humbug … was thinking that was something else. and the idea that those episodes seemed like they were trying to destroy the show felt about right at the time.

    might be just as well that I have less time to consume media like that these days, but I miss the gems

  87. 87.

    Origuy

    We’ve talked about the work Jimmy Carter has done with Habitat, but this will be far more lasting:

    Many know that the Carter Center, founded by Jimmy Carter, has been working towards eradicating neglected diseases like Guinea worm.But fewer know how successful this has been.In 1989, there were >890,000 cases worldwide.In 2021, there were 15.https://t.co/IMKA7M3lcJ pic.twitter.com/Age3CZGosJ— Saloni (@salonium) February 19, 2023

     
    Don’t Google Guinea Worm Disease if you’re squeamish.

  89. 89.

    opiejeanne

    @David 🌈☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: That’s where I first encountered La Rouchies too, outside a DMV in California. I can see it in my mind’s eye but can’t tell you where I was.

    The signs were peculiar, didn’t mention La Rouche, and I was puzzling over the first one when I noticed one that said Queen Elizabeth II is a drug smuggler. The guys at the table were as loser-like as the guy who tried to interest me in voting for John G. Scmitz for President.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Schmitz

  90. 90.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Origuy: Once Nixon went I never paid much attention to US electoral politics, until the latter stages of Reagan. The full horror of US electoral politics only hit me in 2000. I knew and worked with plenty of US unionists in that time, but electoral politics wasn’t really the focus of the work, obviously.

    Carter appears to have been the most decent and real person to hold the Presidency in all that time.
    Who knew? I didn’t. He has done a ton of good since he left politics. Much more good than many of the pols who followed him, including some in the Democratic Party. I don’t count Republicans for obvious reasons.

  91. 91.

    JWR

    @Aussie Sheila: Tell me about it! One of Waters’ cohorts is, (I wrote it down somewhere), oh, it’s John Mearsheimer. In case anyone’s interested in burnishing their Tru-Lefty™ bona fides, you gotta know your Mearsheimer!

    ;)

  92. 92.

    Geminid

    @Aussie Sheila: Larouch died 4 years ago. His wife and followers maintain his political legacy through the Schiller Institute. They are very tightly organized, like a cult.

    They used to be headquartered in Northern Virginia, but their main nexus seems to be NYC now. A Laroucheite ran for Senate against Chuck Schumer last year and, and she spoke at the rally yesterday.

    Larouchites also made news last fall by disrupting town halls conducted by Reps. Ocasio-Cortez and Omar, and a joint one held by Jeffries and Bowman. The “interventions” (as they call them) consisted of the same big loud white guy and big loud brown guy taking turns haranguing the Reps about the danger of nuclear war that their support of Ukraine risked.

    The same thing happened at Representative Richie Torres’s town hall last week. This time they had a big loud white woman who yelled at Torres about his support for funding the Israeli Iron Dome anti-rocket system. It’s not like they care much about the Palestinians so much, but US support for Israel is a wedge issue among Democrats that they want to exploit.

    This rally caused some heated pushback on the part of socialists and anti-war groups here, and they warned their members off. A couple Twitter accounts I follow, Michael Paulauski and “Post Left Watch,”  also covered the prospective rally as an example of a nascent “Red/Brown” alliance.

     

    The rally itself was a flop. I would write it off as a joke except for the participation of the Libertarian Party. A faction named the “Mises Caucus” (after the economist) captured the party’s leadership positions at last summer’s convention and are now trying to exploit the “populist” political space. The party consistently places their presidential candidate on the ballot ballot in all 50 states, and the Mises Caucus intends to make it a factor next year if they can.

  93. 93.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Geminid: That looks like a problem then. I can imagine some self styled US lefties deciding to vote ‘libertarian’ just to show the Democratic Party. My god US politics is stupid. I understand it is a structural problem. But it just reconfirms the critical importance of structural issues regarding the capacity for democratic politics to survive, let alone thrive.

  94. 94.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Aussie Sheila: I mean US electoral politics. Other kinds are not stupid, but far too hard and demanding for the average person who has to work long hours in shitty jobs just to eat. It is so depressing.

  96. 96.

    Tony Jay

    @kalakal:

    That’s pretty much how it works in the UK as well. Varies in detail between the parties. Party membership in the UK is very small but if you join your local party you get to pick your candidate ( or occasionally get rid of your mp).

    Offer specifically does not extend to the Nu-Lab corporate franchise opportunity formerly known as The Labour Party, where the Corporate Entertainment Officer (referred to as Party Leader in some pre-takeover literature) has stripped CLPs of any rights, handing the authority to choose candidates to an unelected bureaucracy that operates strictly as a factional weapon. Said bureaucracy (in one case I’m grinding aware of) heading up its efforts in my home town with an individual who campaigned against the Labour Party and for the Liberal-Democrats in the last Election, and is now stripping incumbent local councillors of the right to stand for their seats on the grounds that they don’t post enough leaflets – the councillors in question being disabled, and having already been chosen by their constituency to stand in the seat.

    Did I mention they’ve deliberately not told the constituency that they’ve deselected their candidates? Or that one of the candidates had the temerity to support her local MP’s reselection campaign by standing in the vote counting room and preventing the team sent down from London from adding scores of illegitimate votes to the challenger’s tally? These two facts may not be unconnected.

    In the rare circumstances where a sitting MP not aligned with the prevailing Nu-Lab ideology (see: Power, Cars, Bitches, Money and Who To Blow To Get Them by P Mandelson) is reselected through an unfortunate and soon to be closed loophole that allows the votes of actual constituency members to be counted, a secondary bar on their continued involvement is activated, involving constant surveillance, continuous bullying and the fabrication of ‘evidence’ that will allow for removal of the Party whip and eventual expulsion by a hand-picked kangaroo court.

    All of this, of course, under the benevolent eye of a UK Media that simply doesn’t think that the curbstomping of internal democracy is worth reporting on, total news blackout. Well, not total, that would be silly. They very occasionally aim a weak beam of flickering light over the ghastly necrotic mess that was once a functional political Party and pass on the news that this is all about ridding the Party of antisemitism, and who could possibly have a problem with that?

    Rant over. I Don’t feel better though.

  97. 97.

    Geminid

    @Aussie Sheila: I think the primary factor in next year’s election will be the economy. If it is strong, Biden will be elected. If it’s not, secondary factors like 3rd party defections may be a factor.

    But no matter what, the election will be held under the current system. Ranked choice voting is being tried in a few states and cities like Maine and New York City, and open, “jungle” primary systems are now used in Alaska, California, Louisiana Washington. But in the short and probably the medium term, we will have to “run the machine as we find it,” as (I believe) Lincoln put it, probably for the rest of this decade.

    I want to see how ranked choice voting and jungle primaries work in practice. They may empower 3rd parties or factions within parties, but that is not neccesarily a good thing. Right now I think that the Democrats moderat/liberal coalition is producing good candidates and good elected officials. I’m not sure a different voting system would produce better results.

  98. 98.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: I get you, I really do. But the Right in UK Labour has always been particularly bad. Agitate for PR, go to the Lib Dems if necessary. I know they are terrible, but the UK left now has a real interest in doing a deal with them. Unless the voting system is reformed, you will always be blackmailed by scurrilous people like Starmer and his acolytes.

  100. 100.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Geminid: You are probably right given that the two main parties can successfully stop other parties being on the ballot in most states, and given that most states won’t enact some form of PR or preferential voting, you really are stuck. I hope to god the US Reserve doesn’t plunge the US into a recession this year.

  104. 104.

    Tony Jay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    The Lib-Dems are just as bad under Davey, and they are never, ever going to accommodate Left ideas, not when the vast majority of their obtainable seats are in Tory Blue areas.

    I think what’s going to happen is that the Left get expelled, bullied and basically driven out of the Nu-Lab Franchise, while Sir Plastic gets tongue-bathed by a cynical Media that literally can’t believe how short-termist these goons are.

    Millions of voters in marginal seats will bite their tongues to get the Tories out, while millions more will take the Starmerites at their word and vote third Party. The Nu-Lab Franchise will have a term in office, fall to pieces because of their ideological commitment to a status quo that has completely failed, maybe scrape a second term in coalition, then get booted out* with the blame for all of the country’s ills hung around their neck by a resurgent Conservative Party.

    And all the time, they’ll be blaming the Traitor Trots they marginalised and abused for not voting for them.

    *Unless, by some miracle, PR gets introduced. Then it’s a whole different ballgame.

  105. 105.

    Geminid

    @Aussie Sheila: The major parties don’t stop the Libertarians from getting on the ballot in all 50 states. The challenge most 3rd parties face is their low numbers of adherents.

  106. 106.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Tony Jay: Your last point is the most important. Get PR done, by hook or by crook. I can’t believe the Lib Dems wouldn’t be interested in it. You only have to do it once. Once done, no one will want to, or more importantly be able, to go back.

  108. 108.

    Brachiator

    @lurker:

    Good show as long as you did not let yourself take it too seriously…

    That’s the problem. There are people who think the show was a documentary.

  109. 109.

    Geminid

    @Aussie Sheila: I have not seen Preferential Voting getting any traction at all in the US. Ranked Choice Voting is picking up support, though.

    I sometimes think that Alaska’s new system could be tbe norm in 20 years. They now have open primaries, like in California and Washigton. But in Alaska, the top four finishers move on to a ranked choice runoff in November.

  110. 110.

    Tony Jay

    @Aussie Sheila:

    The Lib-Dems would want to (most of them, anyway, not sure about where Davey stands) have PR, it would transform their perennial 3rd/4th Party status into a solid 1/5 to 1/4 of the seats in a PR appointed Parliament.

    Their problem is, the last time they got in a position where they could make that demand (the 2010-15 Coalition) they screwed the pooch just about as badly as it could be screwed, and the Referendum on the bastardised version of vote reform they finally got is now a very heavy banhammer in the hands of the status-quo.

    Our problem is that proper PR would change the political landscape in ways that would help all the Parties long-term, but in the short-term, would deny whoever manages to finagle a FPTP majority the elected dictatorship their movers and shakers yearn for.

    The foxes are not going to vote to put better locks on the henhouse door. I’m not sure how we get around that salient fact before the UK turns into Mordor.

  112. 112.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

      There are people who think the show was a documentary.

    How dare you mischaracterise the passengers of the Truth Train like that. They don’t think it’s a documentary, they know it’s a dramatisation of real events. Totally different.

  113. 113.

    Geminid

    @Aussie Sheila: I now know what you mean by “PR.” But I suggest that you type out “Proportional Representation” when first referring to this electoral system, as many people may think you are talking about “Public Relations,”

    I don’t mean to pick on you on particular. People here frequently use undefined acronyms and I sometimes get SAD (Severe Acronym Dysphoria).

  114. 114.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    The Nu-Lab Franchise will have a term in office, fall to pieces because of their ideological commitment to a status quo that has completely failed, maybe scrape a second term in coalition, then get booted out* with the blame for all of the country’s ills hung around their neck by a resurgent Conservative Party.

    So be it. Isn’t the point to defeat the Tories, to take advantage of their current incompetence and confusion to crush them?

    *Unless, by some miracle, PR gets introduced. Then it’s a whole different ballgame.

    I have seen some commentators suggest that Starmer supports PR. The Tories certainly oppose it. There is no chance of getting PR if large numbers of voters stay home or vote for the Conservative Party because they are convinced that the two parties are the same.

    Labour may disappoint you. The Tories openly despise you.

    I don’t see a difficult choice.

  115. 115.

    sab

    Kucinich has always been adamantly anti-war. Sometimes in the real world with people like Putin in power, anti-war is a bad choice.

  116. 116.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Geminid: Ok. Apologies. When I talk politics, PR means proportional representation. Preferential voting has the same outcomes structurally, but differs in how it operates at the electoral level. The outcome is Proportional Representation of parties, the means is preferential voting by people for candidates in order of their personal political preference of the choices on the ballot.

  117. 117.

    Geminid

    @Aussie Sheila: No apologies neccesary. People do this all the time. I think it’s good practice to type out the acronym when first using it though.

    Preferential voting sounds like what we call ranked choice.

  119. 119.

    Amir Khalid

    @Anotherlurker:

    Home is reputedly the only X-Files episode never rerun by the Fox Network; the Peacocks were indeed a very horrifying family by TV standards.

    But it also has a classic MSR moment: after autopsying a very, very inbred baby, Scully sits down on a bench with Mulder, and the conversation turns to a discussion of each other’s genetic heritage. Which ends with him saying, “Scully, I never saw you as a mother before.” A foreshadowing of their relationship’s future course.

  120. 120.

    Amir Khalid

    @lurker:

    The episode with the circus-like setting is Humbug from late Season 2. The one that ends with M&S dancing to Cher’s cover of Walking in Memphis is Post-Modern Prometheus from Season 5.

  121. 121.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    Getting the Tories out is always priority number one, and I’m pretty sure that they will be after the next election. They’re making themselves so comprehensively despised that even the Labour Party voters in marginal seats who feel (quite justifiably) that they have been lied to, smeared and betrayed by the Nu-Lab wing will put an X in the box for whoever can beat the Tories out.

    Labour voters in seats where the Tories aren’t a threat? They will have a different calculation to make. I’ll vote for my MP, not the Party, but where the MP is a sack of shit Nu-Lab drone imposed from above in direct opposition to the wishes of the local Party? I can see the attraction of a protest vote. It can’t just be the voter who has to swallow that shit sandwich, the professional politicians who are supposed to want their vote are supposed to as least pretend to respect their electorate. That’s not part of the Nu-Lab manifesto. Cowering before the mighty Daily Mail is more their speed.

    The sad thing is, it’s not that Labour will disappoint you. It’s that the factionalist goons running Nu-Lab openly hate and despise ‘Labour’ and are openly trying to drive all of those oikish Lefties out of ‘their’ Party. And if they get their wish, if what used to be the Labour Party becomes a donor-supported shell that is performatively hostile to the very idea of centre-left politics… what’s the point of anyone voting for them?

    Which lets the Tories back in. So who’s fault would that be? The voters who were driven away or the politicians who told those voters they didn’t want them?

  122. 122.

    Aussie Sheila

    @Geminid: Yes. It is what you call ‘ranked choice’. It is far more democratic that First Past the Post, or FPTP as we say.😏

  124. 124.

    Amir Khalid

    @lurker:

    I wouldn’t say The X-Files was anti-science. You couldn’t have a co-lead character more pro-science than Dana Scully. (Google “the Scully effect” to get a sense of how she influenced a generation of girls who watched the show.) The show never once mocked her belief in science; it just made clear that it was set in a universe at least occasionally sympathetic to Mulder’s beliefs.

  125. 125.

    Brachiator

    @Tony Jay:

    Getting the Tories out is always priority number one, and I’m pretty sure that they will be after the next election.

    I hope a sufficient number of voters agree with this assessment.

    I can see the attraction of a protest vote.

    Only if it won’t affect a Labour victory.

    It can’t just be the voter who has to swallow that shit sandwich, the professional politicians who are supposed to want their vote are supposed to as least pretend to respect their electorate.

    Ultimately, the politicians need to respect and fear the electorate. That is a challenge here, in the UK and anywhere that democracy exists. But I have watched the Conservative Party cycle through four prime ministers as they try to hold onto the government. And now factions appear to be rebelling against Sunak and possibly even considering giving BoJo another chance. I don’t see any concern for the electorate here.

    That’s not part of the Nu-Lab manifesto. Cowering before the mighty Daily Mail is more their speed.

    You got a problem here, and not just with the Daily Mail. Not too long ago, I watched some TV news segment where the presenter referred to Corbyn as though Unelectable was his middle name. But people like Mick Lynch take no shit from the media. Labour is going to have to learn, even though the media may always have an advantage.

    The sad thing is, it’s not that Labour will disappoint you. It’s that the factionalist goons running Nu-Lab openly hate and despise ‘Labour’ and are openly trying to drive all of those oikish Lefties out of ‘their’ Party.

    So, what are you going to do about it? Scotland neutralized both the Tories and Labour. Maybe Step One is dumping the Tories.

    Which lets the Tories back in. So who’s fault would that be? The voters who were driven away or the politicians who told those voters they didn’t want them?

    Who cares whose fault it might be. People have to dump the Tories, rebuild Labour or create a new party and prevent the UK from becoming economically and politically irrelevant.

    Or people can let the Tories walk all over them. Which they will happily do.

  127. 127.

    Tony Jay

    @Brachiator:

    I hope a sufficient number of voters agree with this assessment.

    It’s looking like they do. We’ll see if it’s enough.

    And now factions appear to be rebelling against Sunak and possibly even considering giving BoJo another chance. I don’t see any concern for the electorate here.

    And the Tories are paying for it at every ballot box that ventures an opinion. Once the UK Media ended its omerta where Tory failures were concerned the General Public shifted into “Fuck these guys” mode at record speed. Just a pity they did it five years too late.

    Labour is going to have to learn, even though the media may always have an advantage.

    The entire UK Media committed a crime against the British electorate when they placed Stopping Corbyn above every single other issue facing the country between 2015-20. In continuing to lie about him, and by providing cover for Sir Plastic’s pogrom, they’re just protecting themselves.

    And yes, Lynch and the other Union leaders are providing a salutary lesson in what being honest, unashamed and direct can do. Unfortunately, the last time Labour tried that was in the run up to the 2017 Election when it almost overturned a 20 point polling deficit and produced a centre-left Government, hence the All-Out Misinformation War of 2017-20. Nu-Lab are not the kind of people to court that kind of Media backlash, they much prefer focus-grouped arglebargle that doesn’t offend the very important people.

    So what are you doing about it?

    Currently? Trying and failing to maintain the Labour Party as a democratic broad-church while also fighting the Tories. There’s no SNP-type vehicle in England (stealing the Patriot label from the Tories and the Leftist Policy label from Labour) to jump to, and we don’t have a PR style system that would allow it.

    Who cares whose fault it might be?

    1) There’s a shit-ton of ‘opinion’ raining down that is seeking to equate ‘disgusted with the rightward lunge of anti-democratic elements in the Leader’s office’ to ‘Tory Enabler’ and/or ‘anti-semite’. If the mission is to save Labour from these goons and give the country hope of a better future, defining where the fault for any future labour electoral/policy failures truly lies is just another important plank that can’t be ignored.

    2) Fuck them. They’re lying sacks of shit and when the Labour vote sees defections from the Left, you can be damned sure that I’ll be pointing out whose fault it is.

  128. 128.

    Tony G

    @opiejeanne: That’s right.  I remember a handful of Larouche acolytes on campus ranting about Queen Elizabeth when I was in college almost a half-century ago.  Jesus, these people never go away,

  129. 129.

    krow10

    @West of the Rockies: My punk buddies & I used to sign each other up for various political mailing lists back in the 80s. LaRouche was a favorite. (Remember the broccoli 🥦 billboards “Eat it George!”)

     

    I still get some Hillsdale College paper spam for that time. It has followed me through six+ moves for three decades now!

  130. 130.

    Geminid

    @Tony G: The Larouche organization is very much like a cult. It reminds me of Scientology in a way. That’s the key to their longevity, I think.

  131. 131.

    Matt McIrvin

    So given that Onion piece where they absolutely murdered The New York Times’ self-justification on transphobia, I was thinking they were doing pretty well on political material lately. But.

    This link popped up in my Facebook feed to a slideshow piece, “Things All Cats Do That Prove They Are Psychopaths”, which was a parody of every dumb clickbait piece on the Internet that has that kind of subject. I don’t know why I started clicking through it. Most of it is the kind of Onion/Clickhole conceptual switcheroo you’d expect: cats are psychopaths because they score high on the psychopathy scales of personality-typing questionaires, because they purred through the Challenger explosion, because cats produced the empty cash-grab sequels to “Starship Troopers”, etc. Mildly amusing.

    And then about two-thirds of the way through, they put in a slide for “Voting For Joe Biden”: “Expecting meaningful change by voting for moderate candidates in an endless cycle of harm reduction is truly unhinged behavior.”

    I’m not sure when this throwaway piece was actually produced–it’s undated and might have been during the 2020 primary cycle, in which case, OK, there was a lot of that going around. The promotion of the link suggests it’s recent. If it’s recent, I’m wondering what The Onion’s game is here. Might just be the usual frustrated-lefty-comedian omni-cynicism, or even someone’s slightly-too-meta attempt to parody that, but it has me speculating about something more sinister going on: is this a concerted vote-suppression ploy? Maybe the past decade’s politics has me jumping at shadows.

  133. 133.

    opiejeanne

    @evodevo: I had to listen quietly to a county inspector rant about Civil Servants and how they were overpaid and unnecessary, and that we shouldn’t be paying their pensions,  because I wanted him to pass the work done on our fireplace and chimney at a cabin we used to own. I sooo wanted to point out the obvious to him, but I figured he was the kind of asshole who would take it out on the project.

  134. 134.

    Another Scott

    @Matt McIrvin: It looks like it is a new comment for that slide show [from December].  It’s probably meant to be jarring.

    In poking around Google I saw an old Politico link claiming that TheOnion had gone “all in for Bernie”.  I didn’t click it.  I check outside if Politico says that it is raining…

    Hang in there!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  137. 137.

    StringOnAStick

    I remember my RW dad falling for the Larouchies in the early 1980’s due to some airport pitch that was pro nuclear power, him being a mining engineer that was involved in a uranium boom that was rapidly going bust.  He gave them some money and then they started calling and very aggressively demanding more and with their crazier pitches.  Finally I heard him yell at them that he was “trying to make a living in a failing industry and your advertising is so crazy I think you are trying to help kill nuclear power!” .  Maybe going full tilt crazy right after they set the initial hook is how they weed out who won’t jump fully into their cult.  Dad has remained a hard RW, common to his profession, though he finally admits tRUmp is ” a creep” thanks to Jan 6.  He’ll still vote for him if he gets the nom though, because of the R on the ballot.

  138. 138.

    Matt McIrvin

    @JWR:

    “But it was only fantasy

    The wall was too high, as you can see

    No matter how he tried, he could not break free

    And the worms ate into his brain.”

  139. 139.

    Matt McIrvin

    @StringOnAStick: Oh, yeah, the LaRouchies pulled in some people by being big boosters for nuclear power and Reagan’s SDI (though they weren’t 100% certain Reagan wasn’t a secret Commie).

    One aspect of their infinitely ramifying conspiracy worldview, though, was some completely unhinged claims about nuclear physics. Something about atomic nuclei being clusters of polyhedra. They had some batshit idea for every realm of human enterprise.

    My absolute favorite bit of it all was the part about how A440 orchestral tuning was part of the conspiracy.

  140. 140.

    Geminid

    I was glad to see Molly Conger, the @socialistdogmom, get exposure for her reporting on this rally. She is local to me, and has done a lot of good reporting on the alt-right since 2017 and the deadly rally in her home town of Charlottesville.

  141. 141.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: The Larouchies make me paranoid enough to think that the American Green Party might be an “op” of theirs. They’re sneaky enough to pull that off, too.

    It’s a very secretive organization. They have their goon squads, but they also have a lot of educated and intelligent members who really believe they are part of an important elite. That’s one thing I think they have in common with Scientology, but instead of L. Ron Hubbard their master genius is Lyndon Larouche.

  143. 143.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: They’ve had success laundering some of their bullshit into mainstream conservatism. You know whenever anyone says that volcanoes make a hundred times as much of some pollutant or other than all of human activity? Yeah, that came from the LaRouche cult. Was legitimized by passing through Dixy Lee Ray, then Rush Limbaugh. Got mutated from a story about ozone depletion to a story about global warming by Thomas Sowell.

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